


My Mother

by G_N_Story



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, F/M, Sirens, Succubi & Incubi, Wendigo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 03:03:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15621105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/G_N_Story/pseuds/G_N_Story
Summary: The sins of my mother are vast and varied.  Those sins, committed across decades, must now become mine.  For from the moment I came into my mother’s life, every sin she exacted, she exacted for me.





	My Mother

The sins of my mother are vast and varied.  Those sins, committed across decades, must now become mine.  For from the moment I came into my mother’s life, every sin she exacted, she exacted for me. 

My childhood was idyllic, in every sense of the word.  Even though she was a single parent, my mother never seemed to struggle.  Everything that she did, she did with poise and grace.  Never a hair out of place nor a smudge in her lipstick, my mother was perfect.  And she loved me with every single ounce of her being.  She was a force of nature—strong and protective and ever watchful—she shielded me from every ill or injury that the world threatened upon children.  I grew up knowing nothing but bliss.

My mother was beautiful.  I would watch her apply her makeup, sprawled on her bed, with a sense of awe.  It was like watching Van Gough create Starry Night.  She had an array of brushes and paints, powders and lotions, and she would apply each with an expert hand in front of her massive, golden Vanity.  She would apply her lipstick and catch my eye in the mirror, smiling wide with her half-painted lips and I would blush and giggle.  I would watch her brush out her raven hair, always smooth and shiny, and I would reach out to run my fingers through it.  It felt like warm silk.  I would look into the mirror and search for my mother in my own features.  I had blotchy cheeks and a spray of freckles, I had wiry hair the color of straw, I had long, knobby limbs and crooked front teeth.  I would try to find features of my mother, but I never could.  But my mother would tell me not to worry, sitting down beside me and promising me the world, making me forget about my vain attempts to compare myself to her.

Over the years, my mother always had an array of gentleman callers.  They would appear on our doorstep, a dozen roses in the crook of their arm and smelling of cologne.  Some of them would wave to me, peeking out at them from behind the couch, others would ignore me altogether.  My mother never got me a sitter, instead she would leave me at home alone, somehow trusting me to behave.  I always did.  I would sit on the couch and watch television, snacking on peanut butter and celery, waiting for my mother’s return.  Her dates never lasted very long.  She’d return home an hour later, dinner packed into Styrofoam and wrapped neatly in brown paper bags.  I would hug her gleefully and we would sit down at the dining room table and unwrap the leftovers, turn on a movie, and snuggle up together as we ate.  My mother never went on second dates.

Even though I was homeschooled, I wasn’t a lonely child by any means.  In fact, my mother had a whole collection of single parents that she was friends with, each with a single child of their own.  We were all homeschooled, so we would get together and go to museums during the week, Chuck-E-Cheese on the weekends.  I got along royally with these other children.  But as a group, we rarely got along with anyone else.  We would often leave the Laser Tag Arena or Trampoline Room full of crying children in our wake.  We were all spoiled rotten little kids and we weren’t used to having to share.  All of us together could quickly gang up on and overpower the other kids, and we were never scolded or told to act otherwise. 

I think it was around this time that I realized that my mother was different.  With her peer group, all perfectly groomed men and women dressed impeccable no matter where we went, they always stood out amongst the other adults.  The parents of the children we terrorized were usually dressed in sweat pants and hoodies, bags under their tired eyes, harried and weary looking. They’d slump against their plastic seats and drink lite beer, while our parents perched like a flock of jewel-encrusted birds along the edges and in the corners, sipping something they brought in an engraved flask.  Even when the other parents would come charging at them, shouting about something one of us had done to their child, my mother and the rest of her friends would just blink at the red faced fiends.  My mother would say something quiet, and the color would drain from the other parent’s face and they would turn and gather up their family, leaving in a hurry.

Sometimes, while we played in indoor treehouses or trampled through museums, I would catch a glimpse of my mother with the mother of one of my homeschooled friends.  My friend’s name was Lucas, his mother was named Reina.  Reina and my mother would sit close together whenever we were out, holding hands and smiling at one another.  As I grew older, I began to understand why none of my mother’s dates had panned out in the past.  Eventually, those dates stopped altogether, and instead of a new man appearing every weekend, it was Reina and Lucas on our doorstep on Friday nights.  I was perfectly happy with the arrangement.  Reina and my mother would leave, and Lucas and I would be left to our own accords.  We were already good friends and we were gleeful at the thought of becoming siblings.  We’d play video games, listen to music, eat ice cream, and do the kinds of things that ten year olds do when they aren’t supervised.  Our mothers would return around dawn the next day, leftovers gripped in their manicured hands.  The four of us would sit down and have breakfast, cleaning our plates of whatever fancy restaurant had been chosen the night before. 

When I was thirteen, I was told I would be attending public high school the next year.  This was apparently a decision the group had come to.  At first, I was forlorn at the idea, but my mother told me that I needed to learn how to socialize with other people.  She promised that all of my friends would be there and that I wouldn’t need to worry. 

On my first day of high school, I looked at myself in the mirror and for the first time saw a small glimpse of my mother staring back.  My hair was darker, now a deep chestnut color, and no longer a frizzy mess, but instead tight, soft locks falling around my face.  I hadn’t needed braces, as my adult teeth had grown in straight and white.  Nor was I plagued by acne, another scourge that I learned most kids my age were struggling with when I went to public school.  My skin tone was even, my eyes were bright, and when I smirked at myself in the mirror, my lips twisted in a perfect replica of my mother. 

None of my homeschooled friends seemed to be dealing with the typical puberty pains of our age.  We hadn’t even known them to be so until we got to high school and were surrounded by girls with tragically uneven breasts and boys with cracking voices.  As we walked together into high school, I was reminded of our parents at bowling alley or the swimming pool, looking like display items surrounded by their tragically flawed counterparts.  Was that me now?  When had it happened?  Had I changed or had I always been this way, a world apart?  When Lucas and I walked into our first public school class, every head turned and eyes followed us as we found our seats.  All of us were in advanced classes, so Lucas and I were the only freshman in the sophomore level science class.  A pretty blonde girl glared at us from across the room.

That pretty blonde girl’s name with Bethanie, and she was a waspy little thing.  It took her all of ten minutes to dress us both down.  We had learned well from our parents, sitting perfectly still and blinking at her as she made fun of our stiff white shirts and matching polished shoes.  But our non-response only made the other kids laugh harder at us.  To them, we were strange: perfect posture and non-affected faces.  The rumor quickly went around that we and all our friends were in a cult. 

The rumor hardly bothered us though and by our sophomore year, we had classmates asking us to join.  How could they resist?  We were like Gods among men in those cramped halls, everyone could see it on us, seeping from our very beings.  We were better than them and they knew it.  Bethanie still tried to bother Lucas and me, but once I had seduced her boyfriend and had all of her friends fawning over me at lunch, she soon realized she was on the losing team.  By junior year, she was among the gaggle that followed us around.  We had plenty of admirers, my little group of friends.  They all wanted whatever mysterious thing that we had, constantly asking to be invited along to our homes or along on our outings.  But our parents were firm: no outsiders. 

It was this policy that had landed me in the principal’s office one day in January for a line of questioning about my mother and the parents of my friends.  It seemed that the rumor about us being a cult was reaching fever pitch and some of the other parents in the school were calling in with concerns.  CPA was called and my mother was dragged in, made up and impeccable as always, immediately intimidating every other adult in the room.  It always amazed me the way she talked her way out of things, ever with a pleasant smile and well-timed comments.  I again felt like a child, laying on my front and watching my mother apply makeup.  My attention was just as apt, witnessing the way she navigated a difficult situation.  By the time she left, all concerns were assuaged and there would be no need at all for a home visit by the CPA representative. 

I saw my mother cry for the first and last time when I graduated high school.  My friends and I were ecstatic.  Our eternal success had landed us all in Ivy League schools and we were all excited to be finished with the juvenile trials of public high school.  Our parents, however, all had grave looks on their faces.  Our fellow students and their guardians gave us all a wide berth, most do when they see us, but we could practically hear their whispers.  _It’s not right, it’s not fair, it’s not natural.  Criminals, cultists, drug lords, illuminati._   It’s difficult for me to take on the perspective of those other people, but I suppose that if I try, I can see how incredibly outrageous our long trail of good fortune might seem.  I had never known anything but success, but I also didn’t know what the price of that success truly was.

There were no parties.  My mother told me that she had something important to tell me.  I had never seen her so grave, never watched worry crease her perfect face.  It was off-putting and it made me frightened.  I got into the car with her and we drove out of the city.  I had no idea where we were going and my mother said nearly nothing on the long drive.  The highways turned to country roads and still we drove.  On and on for hours, through the night.  It wasn’t until the sun was cresting the horizon that we finally pulled to a stop.

I looked around, unsure where I was.  It was a dingy little trailer park, the sort of place I had never been before, full of crumbling mobile homes and dirt lots filled with run down vehicles and discarded children’s toys.  I gave my mother an incredulous look, why had she brought me to this horrible place in the middle of nowhere?

We were parked in front of a brown and white trailer with a crooked screen door, my mother’s sleek sport’s car looking out of place. 

“Stay in the car.”

My mother didn’t look at me.  Instead, she opened her door and climbed out, leaving me alone behind the tinted windows.  Her expensive heels crunched on the gravel as she approached the house, never glancing back.  She climbed the rickety wooden stairs and knocked on the screen door.  A figure appeared in the door way and my mother stepped aside, allowing me full view of the stranger.

What I saw that day took my breath away and rocked my understanding of the world permanently.  The woman who stood beside my mother in a dirty t-shirt and threadbare slippers was…me.  It was me if I had lived a different life, if I had been somebody.  Shorter, plumper, features far duller and creased, hair brown and lanky, eyes pale and sunken, skin oily, posture slumped and shy.  She looked…miserable.  And dirty.  And tired.  I wanted to leap from the car, to demand to know who this woman was.  Did I have a twin?  I couldn’t imagine my mother giving up a child, but here was my replica, in the middle of nowhere, living in an old trailer.

My mother exchanged a few words with the woman, who stared at her wide eyed and kept her arms crossed protectively across her chest.  It was a brief encounter, and soon my mother was crunching back across the driveway towards the car. 

“Who is that, Mama?” I asked.

“That’s your Changeling, my love.”

My mother is not human and now, neither am I.  Once, I was.  Born to teenage parents in the middle of Pennsylvania, my mother had noticed me right away and had known that I belonged to her.  My human parents, neglectful and selfish, hadn’t even heard her when she came into my room at night and began to feed me at her breast.  When the sickly child born to a drug-addicted mother had taken a sudden turn to picturesque health, the doctors had called it a miracle.  But really it was true mother’s milk nourishing me, recreating me.

Birthing a Changeling is no easy task.  It’s dirty, bloody work, my mother told me.  My mother cannot have real children of her own, only these half-creatures, born limp and faceless.  And as I fed on my mother, the thing fed on me.  Slowly, after months of clandestine nightly visits, the Changeling began to resemble me until one winter night, my mother realized that it was a perfect copy.  On the outside at least.  It’s not truly human.  It has no soul, no real personality.  It cannot feel love or bear children.  And it will die at a young age, weak body finally giving out.

So on that night, my mother left with me and not her Changeling.  In my crib, that creature remained to be raised by the young parents who bore me, to live that life that I would have been condemned to had my mother not interceded.  And there she was, a quiet, plain little thing that didn’t even recognize its own mother, living with a drug dealing boyfriend and working at a gas station.  That would have been me, would have been my life if my mother hadn’t whisked me away, raised me as her own, transformed me into what she is.

My mother was born in a similar fashion, to human parents in the year 1936, the height of the Great Depression.  Her true mother had stolen her away in the night, switched her with her own child, and raised her as a proper lady in Montreal.  She fed her a special diet, the same diet that I had been fed since my mother took me in. 

You see, those Styrofoam boxes had never been filled with leftovers.  Well, they had been leftovers in some sense.  The leftovers of my mother’s dates, what was left over when she had finished consuming them.  It was the remains of the men—the men my mother had dated, the men she and Reina had seduced on their nights out—cooked into elegant recipes at a secret flat my mother kept downtown.  My success, my mother’s success, our good looks, our irresistible nature, our prolonged lives and perfect bodies, all of it is because my mother hunted, killed, cooked, and consumed human flesh.

My mother cried that day that I graduated because she could no longer shield me from the ugly truth.  I had to know, I had to understand.  It was painful to accept, and I had outright refused to at first.  I refused my mother’s meals and I threatened to reach out to my birth parents.  I punished my mother for loving me and I soon learned my lesson.  It was just a small pimple at first, the very first one I had ever gotten.  Soon, that turned into a lesion, and then my hair began to fall out.  As my body broke down, so too did my social standing.  I lost many friends and even a scholarship after a failed interview. 

Lucas, concerned for me, had pulled me aside.  He had learned the horrible truth that day as well, but he told me that some part of him had known all along.  Nobody can be as perfect, as effortless as our mothers, he had always suspected that there was something else occurring.  He embraced his fate as Wendigo, he told me, I should too.

It wasn’t until I took my mother’s car in secret and again visited my Changeling’s home that I changed my mind.  She hadn’t been there when I arrived, so I walked into the trailer without invite and found her boyfriend lounging on a broken futon.  The cramped space smelled awful, like rotting food and body odor and something chemical.  The prematurely balding man had woken and, commenting on how good I looked today, hadn’t hesitated to demand a blow job, a service I have never provided.  Instinct took over. 

Killing and consuming that man hadn’t been easy.  It was a bloody mess and the tiny kitchenette in the trailer left much to be desired.  I ate only from his thigh, the meat too sour for me to consume any more, but instantly I noticed that my eyes were brighter and the lesion on my face was lessened.  I showered in the filthy bathroom, changed into the best clothes I could find in the closets, and drove to the next town over.  It was easy to find a couple of high school football jocks to get into my mother’s nice car with me.  They tasted better than my Changelings good-for-nothing boyfriend, but still a bit chewy.  I moved on to the next town after them.

When my spree was over, I had killed 14 boys in total.  My lips were fuller than they had ever been, my hair was glossy and dark, my skin was clear, my breasts were larger, and my legs were longer.  I received a call from local woman’s foundation offering me a substantial scholarship.  Bethanie called as well to confess to me that she had had a crush on me since the moment she had seen me my freshman year and to tell me that she was finally brave enough to ask me on a date.  When I returned home that night, my mother gave me a knowing look, drew me a bath, and brushed out my long hair as I washed the blood from my skin.

“You are my world,” she had whispered to me.  “My one true love.”

I never faced repercussions for those murders.  No, my Changeling went to prison instead.  I had been careless, I had been seen, but what else is that morbid doll for if not to take my pains for me?  It’s what she was born to do.  Over time, I got better and my palette became much more refined.  Now, I prefer men in their early thirties, athletic, Latin, preferably Cuban, who drink spiced Rum.  The flavor of meat like that, and the effects that it has, far outweigh those first bites of white trash I had in a dingy trailer in the middle of nowhere.

I still see my mother often.  We look the same age now.  I ask her if she will ever have another child, Reina is already planning to snatch another.  She tells me the same thing she told me back then. 

“You are my only true love.”

I live with Lucas.  We hunt together often and I might even love him.  We have picked out a child and the Changeling grows inside of Lucas’s body every day.  It’s a little girl, one of 27 in a massive, Mormon, polygamist family living in the desert.  They have enough children already, we figure, and when I feed her on my breast at night, her siblings in the room staring at me with terrified eyes, she smiles up at me like I am her whole world.  I will love her in a way her parents cannot and I will give her a life they could never provide. 

She will be my one true love.  And I will be her Mother.   

 


End file.
